My Secret Lover

now
anxiously asking his stick-thin partner in the back of the taxi, ‘Do you think
we’ve bought some time?’
    I can’t seem to muster any sympathy
for him. I went off Canadians after Bernard, who pronounced it BerNARD as if
plain Bernud wasn’t bad enough.
    Vladimir calls it restructuring the loan. You have to be
a euphemism expert in finance. I wonder if he knows that they call him The
Impaler. Course he must. He’s probably proud of it, like Joanna was when she told
me with an excited little giggle which made me wonder slightly about their sex
life.
     
    The traffic lights are red at Acton and the bloke in the Audi next to me is talking on his mobile phone. He’s confident
looking. The sort of person who uses a mobile phone for a chat, not just to let
his wife know he’s going to be late. Is he speaking to his wife? I wonder. He’s
talking through a big pleased-with-himself smile which makes me suspect there’s
a mistress somewhere in town, whom he’s left lying in scarlet silk sheets,
still smelling of him, whispering down the phone about the things they’ve done
together. Or the things they’ll do next time. Is it her flat, I wonder, or his?
The Audi is a convertible model which means he must have money, doesn’t it? Not
that you can necessarily tell anything from a car.
    His eyes meet mine for a fraction of
a second, catching me watching him. I shrug my shoulders trying to indicate
that I know I am not the sort of person who normally drives a lime-green
Beetle. He frowns, looks back to the road, shoves the gearstick into first,
revs the engine slightly as the cross traffic stops, then chucks the phone down
on the seat next to him. He’s impatient to be gone. A lime-green Beetle is the
sort of car his mistress would drive. Perhaps she actually does and I am an
unwanted reminder of his double life.
    I stick my tongue out as his car cuts
in front of me as three lanes go to two. For all he knows, I could have a lover
too, or several. I could be a dominatrix with a sports bag full of leather and
whips in the irritatingly small boot of this car. Or, I could be a private
midwife dashing through the night to get to a home birth. Or an A&E
consultant called in to perform an emergency, life-saving operation. Lime
green’s not a colour you’d automatically associate with the medical profession,
but my usual work car might be in for a service.
    I could be a very important person.
    Actually, he probably wasn’t thinking
anything at all.
     
    Differences between men and women:
    2. Back stories.
    This is why I would normally rather
go out for an Indian meal with Michelle than Andy. With Andy, there is a little
discussion about whether raita comes gratis with the poppadoms, and whether
we’re hungry enough for an aloo gobi on the side. Then Andy starts off his pint
of Kingfisher while it’s still on the table, and we generally test each other
on quiz questions. When we come out of the restaurant, the only comment Andy is
likely to make is, ‘Nice, but not cheap,’ or ‘What does Taj Mahal mean in
Hindi?’ With Michelle, we order everything we fancy, chat non-stop, get quite
drunk, eat coconut ice cream out of a coconut half shell, which neither of us
actually likes very much, but you need something sweet after all that lager.
When we leave the restaurant, after much hilarity with the waiter trying to get
our arms into the sleeves of our coats, we talk all the way home about the
history of the couple at the next table whose conversation we have been
listening in to whilst conducting an increasingly loud one of our own.
     
    * * *
     
    Some of the semi-detached suburban
houses lining the dual carriageway still have lights on. I wonder about all the
lives that are going on behind all the net curtains. Are they all as
complicated and sordid as those of the people Michelle and I always seem to end u p sitting next to? Is that how normal lives are? Is my life one of
the most boring in the world? Do women who sit next to me and Andy in Indian
restaurants travel home frustrated, as if they’ve been to see a romantic comedy
at the cinema which did not make them laugh or cry?
    If my life were a film, who would
play me?
    This is what I mean about having
moments when you wonder what it’s all about.
    I don’t know why it always gets me on
the A40.

7
     
    My mother (who is called Grace, a
name which is very much back in fashion), is in a sulk because she was trying
to pretend that it’s her first time in the